Research Studentship in Low Power Asynchronous Design

An earmarked EPSRC research studentship is available to work on an
EPSRC-funded project to investigate the potential of asynchronous
design techniques to improve the power-efficiency of digital electronic
ciruits.
This studentship has arisen as a result of the formation of a Low Power
Cluster of UK universities comprising the Universities of Manchester,
Sheffield, Liverpool and Queen's University, Belfast. The cluster will
be responsible for arranging an annual UK workshop on low-power design
and will meet regularly to coordinate activities.

The studentship is in the AMULET research group under Professor S.B.Furber. The AMULET group has established an international
reputation for its work in asynchronous circuit design. The AMULET1 microprocessor is a fully
self-timed implementation of the ARM RISC architecture, and is the first
fully asynchronous VLSI implementation of a commercial microprocessor
architecture. In 1995 the group gained a British Computer Society Award for
AMULET1 and the 'Computing' IT Gold Award for Technology Transfer jointly
with Advanced RISC Machines Limited who have licensed the AMULET processor
technology from the University. More recently first samples of the
AMULET2e asynchronous embedded microcontroller have been obtained and these
are being used as the basis of a number of low-power system design
experiments.

The AMULET group has strong industrial connections through its many
collaborative research projects and expects to bring asynchronous design
techniques to commercial fruition within the next five years. Within this
project the focus is the exploitation of asychronous design for improving
power-efficiency.

The studentship is tenable for 3 years and carried standard EPSRC terms
with regard to the payment of fees and maintenance.